Tying up loose threads

This week is a light one for the kids at any rate. We've finished our latest round of projects and have begun to work with Brigitte Berman, our video artist. I think it was a great first day. Students are prepping a pitch for Thursday and I'm off to coach a volleyball tournament tomorrow.

Meanwhile, reports are being written and marks are being finalized. Next week, I'll be setting aside a day for students who need to rewrite a math test to be able to do so. All those students eligible for rewrites have had the tests sent home to be signed, but I'll do my best to send a formal reminder home this week.

In many cases, I think the difference between a B and a C is simply a more careful approach to test taking: remembering to show work, reading carefully to answer all parts of the question and careful checking over after you're done can make up a lot of marks. Since we're a bit short on texts for the 6's, I'm also happy to photocopy chapters of the Grade 6 textbook for anyone wanting to review.

I hope students see this as an opportunity to build on their success and am happy to follow up with any extra questions you might have.

Regards,

Ms. G

Banethi Performance

Here's the video of last night's performance:



I'm really happy all our hard work with Andrew worked out.

Next week, we're on to work with Brigitte Berman, our video artist, and there's two walking field trips coming up as well:

On the 4th, we'll go to the Osborne collection to look at the history of children's books. This is a trip I've done before and I always find it fascinating. Hopefully, the students will as well.

On the 11th, we go to the Gerstein library at U of T, where we'll be looking at environmental change and running some computer simulations and experiments.

This year has seemed particularly busy, but I'm excited at all the opportunities the students have had to learn from different experts and in different mediums.

Brochures: a requested post

Both the Grade 5's and 6's have been working this week to put together a brochure. For the 5's, the brochure should explain the citizenship process using information from their textbook, while the 6's have each chosen a country to research. Their brochure will persuade the Canadian government to begin or increase trade with that country. Most students seem to be progressing fairly smoothly with the research, but are looking to make their brochure look as good as possible.

We went over a few key points in class together about brochures in general:
--The importance of the title page to attract the reader and give the main idea
--The final page should conclude by summarizing main points, making a call to action or by asking a question
--Brochures need a word/picture balance to communicate without overwhelming
--Brochures are a persuasive medium so it is important to remember your audience and your purpose

Then we headed to the computer lab today, where we looked at some key features in Word, like using columns and adapting margins, different types of bullets and font choices, etc.

Tomorrow, we have a double library period, which should prove useful in getting our work together.

Here are my suggestions for how to proceed:

1. Gather data
2. Decide on your topic headings and titles as well as basic layout (4 column? 6 column?)
3. Add main text information
4. Play with font size and wording to find the best fit for the space available
5. Decide on images and order of information
6. Review the outline and rubric: Is there anything you have forgotten?
7. Fine-tune font and colour choices, play with backgrounds and other fun stuff.

Of course, you can also choose to do part or even all of your brochure by hand, but a typed brochure automatically looks more professional and polished, so try to get your information typed in, if nothing else. Good luck and see you in the morning.

Cells and such

There's a science quiz tomorrow, which students should have written in their agendas. I just got an email asking me for the link to the website we used to investigate cells and thought I'd recommend them in general:

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/

While this might be a useful tool for reviewing for the test, they also have different videos and web apps to explore that we didn't really have time to investigate in class. I keep discovering new ones.

Happy New Year

First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who brought food or presents for the class or various school drives. Personally, I felt very blessed this holiday season. I hope that everyone has had a restful and fun holiday break. I know I did.

Starting the year off with some good memories from December:



And looking forward to new challenges.

January looks like a busy month. We have the concert on the 20th, where 305 will be performing some of our Banethi movements. We have two trips (one on the 21st to look at Climate Change and one on the 3rd of February to look at the history of bookmaking). I'm coaching Girls Volleyball for a tourney on the 26th.

And we also have Brigitte Berman coming in to work with us on developing our our short films.

Among my favourite presents this year was a videocamera, which I hope to use with the class. If you have any video equipment you wouldn't mind sharing or any time to come in yourselves on the days Brigitte will be here (see Calendar), we'd love to have your help and your equipment. It's always good to have as many hands on deck as possible during filming and we promise to take very good care of any equipment. The MACbooks our school has recently acquired should help nicely with editing as well.

See you all on Monday!